Increasing populations in desirable communities have resulted in higher density living and the concomitant problems of privacy, noise, and access to light and air for individual living units. Attempts have been made to arrange multiple housing units to maximize efficiency of land-use while still providing some privacy, access to light and air, and noise and visual pollution abatement for individual homes. For privacy and to abate noise and visual pollution, Fishman, U.S. Pat. No. 4,345,407, arranged several housing units around a courtyard with living and sleeping areas facing the courtyard and service areas such as bathrooms, storage rooms and garages facing the sources of noise and visual pollution. For access to light and air, Sproul, U.S. Pat. No. 3,427,645, exposed more dwelling side wall by means of an oblique arrangement of lots and dwellings, resulting in a psychological feeling of spaciousness.
For almost complete privacy, individual courtyards enclosed by a house, garage and fence are disclosed by Gentry, U.S. Pat. No. 3,874,137, Gentry has arranged lots in rows and columns. There are two lots per row and a multiplicity of lots stacked one upon the other per column. Two columns are contiguous. The back edges of the lots of a row face each other at a common back edge. The front edges of the lots of each column and each row face public streets. The back yard of a given lot is enclosed on one side by a side wall of the next-door neighbor's house and to achieve privacy for that yard, there are no windows in the side wall so the next-door neighbor cannot view that back yard. The opposite side of the back yard is enclosed by the side wall of the house on the given lot and has windows opening up on the resident's own yard. Total privacy for the back yard is achieved by completing the enclosure of the back yard with the back garage wall on the given lot and the windowless back wall of the back yard neighbor's house in the other column. This arrangement then requires that the walls with windows facing a house's own back yard must face in one direction and, consequently, the walls with windows facing a house's own back yard in the other column of houses must face in the opposite direction. Thus, in Gentry' s arrangement, if the houses in one column have the side wall windows receiving, for example, southern exposure, then the houses in the other column cannot receive that southern exposure. Similarly, the windowless side walls in this arrangement cannot be made to all face the source of, say, cold winds or noise pollution.
In summary, the prior art does not allow the side walls with windows of houses in parallel columns to all face the same direction to take advantage of local conditions while still facing their own back yards to maintain privacy from the view of next-door neighbors. Nor does the prior art provide for direct access to light and air and actual spaciousness for individual back yards while at the same time preserving a parallel arrangement of lots and houses for maximum land-use efficiency.